SOA projects may experience limited success when they are driven from
the bottom up by developers unfamiliar with the strategic needs of
the organization. Building SOA for the sake of SOA without reference
to the business context is a project without organizing principles and
guidance. The result is a chaotic implementation that has no business
relevance. On the other hand, taking a top-down enterprise-wide approach
to SOA requires such enormous time investments that by the time the
project is complete, the solution no longer maps to business needs...
By contrast, Microsoft advocates a 'middle out' approach which combines
both top-down and bottom-up methodologies. In this approach, SOA efforts
are driven by strategic vision and business need, and are met through
incremental, iterative SOA projects that are designed to deliver on
business goals one business need at a time. The concept of SOA can be
viewed from several possible perspectives. While no single perspective
or set of perspectives represents a definitive view of a SOA, from a
holistic view these perspectives assist in understanding the underlying
architectural requirements. Microsoft believes that there are three
abstract capability layers exposed within a SOA: (1) Expose—focuses
on how existing IT investments are exposed as a set of broad,
standards-based services, enabling these investments to be available
to a broader set of consumers. (2) Compose—Once services are created,
they can be combined into more complex services, applications or cross-functional business processes. Because services are exist independently
of one another they can be combined (or 'composed') and reused with
maximum flexibility. As business processes evolve, business rules and
practices can be adjusted without constraint from the limitations of
the underlying applications. Composing services requires some sort of
workflow or orchestration mechanism. Microsoft provides these
capabilities via BizTalk Server 2006 (BTS) or Windows Workflow Foundation
(WF). (3) Consume—When a new application or business process has
been created that functionality must be made available for access
(consumption) by IT systems, other services or by end-users. Consumption
focuses on delivering new applications that enable increased
productivity and enhanced insight into business performance. Users may
consume 'composed' services through a broad number of outlets including
web portals, rich clients, Office business applications (OBA), and
mobile devices.

Report on the Atom Publishing Protocol Interop, April 16-17, 2007:
"The Atompub Interop results are summarized on the Wiki; what do they
mean? Obviously, good news: The fact that people from this many places,
most of whom had never met before, got together and were able to put
that many check-marks on the grid, based on a protocol whose design
is not quite frozen, verges on the miraculous... It's become pretty
obvious that a pretty broad range of pieces of software can fairly
claim to to be Atompub implementations. This is more obvious on the
server than on the client side, partly because the implementations
are more numerous and mature at this point. Some are clearly not
general-purpose; for example, the O'Reilly people at the Interop event
had what appeared to be a perfectly legal implementation; but you could
only post DocBook XML to it. Which I can see being useful for them, but
a vanilla blogging client probably won't work that well with it, out
of the box... Technologies represented: Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java,
C#; DB2, Oracle, MySQL, Derby, flat files; Linux, Windows, OS X,
Solaris. Spot the pattern? Sun and IBM and Oracle have working
database-backed Atom stores. Microsoft and IBM, that we know of, have
in-progress clients. Judging by my email, there are a bunch of startups
hacking together one side or another of the protocol. Draw your own
conclusions, but I think it's obvious..."

John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, speaking at the AIIM/On Demand
trade show in Boston: "Businesses that use ECM (Enterprise Content
Management) software to manage data could soon be giving employees
more control over that data, as application providers are inspired by
Web 2.0 tools like wikis, mashups and data tags. BI (Business
Intelligence) software goes a step beyond document tracking, and helps
users to fix the inefficiencies in how they save and share their data.
Software providers such as Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft have developed
sets of software tools to serve that need, but future BI suites can
be far more powerful using Web 2.0-style technology and behavior,
Schwarz said. The new software could use social networks to give users
the power to pool resources and buying power, he said. Owens and Minor
in Mechanicsville, Virginia, is a hospital equipment supplier that uses
Business Objects software to merge buying budgets of thousands of
hospitals and save them money by negotiating with medical equipment
vendors for volume discounts. Next-generation software could also
rely on a large community of individuals to contribute to a database
and correct their own mistakes, in a model similar to the Wikipedia.org
online encyclopedia. Organic Valley Farms is a dairy cooperative based
in LaFarge, Wisconsin, that uses BI software to monitor nationwide
demand for milk, compare that to competitors' productivity and weather
patterns, and adjust their own production and shipping to maximize
profits. Future versions of Web-inspired BI software could also send
data to mobile platforms like handsets and cell phones, allow simple
Google-fashion searches as well as expert data queries, and expand
databases that contain purely coded information to also include
unstructured documents, e-mail, and even images."

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is at the heart of many business-transformation efforts. Many enterprises approach SOA transformation
incrementally, using their valuable legacy IT systems to participate as
service providers. The solution architect's challenge is not only to
deliver the SOA infrastructure as a means to aid transformation, but
also to ensure that enterprise-wide business operations remain robust
and compliant. Your enterprise must develop an enterprise information-management strategy that can be part of the SOA and maintain overall
data and content consistency across all business operations.

I've now put online the slides I used for my keynote at the OASIS
Symposium this morning. Warning: these are very minimalist but you
might have fun imagining what I said around these few words. The
advice section is for OASIS as an organization, such as when I
suggested they remove the RAND option they have in their IP policy
right now, leaving the two RF options. Since they've put in the new
three-way policy, only 1 out of 50 groups have gone RAND. 2% is
hardly enough to keep it going in OASIS. At the end of my talk
someone suggested that some industry groups might not like the
no-RAND option, but, then again, they're not using it. Just kill it,
in my opinion. In the same way, I don't think OASIS is a standards
factory, I was just cautioning them against becoming one. There are
groups in the world that are just standards factories for hire.
Unfortunately, the difference between good groups and bad groups is
not alway obvious to the casual observer. In April of 2005, IBM
announced that it would only use one of the RF options where we
would work with OASIS in the future. Any other takers on this pledge?

For the third time now, Google offers it's Summer of Code (SoC) program.
It's Google's way of helping open source projects by paying bounties
for serious contributions. To keep the work serious, every project
consists of (1) a student that does the work, the SoC project only
accepts projects from students; (2) a mentor who helps provides help
and advice about the project, and who evaluates the project at the end
-- to make sure the bounty is deserved; (3) a mentoring organization
that provides mentors, these are usually organizations involved with
open source projects. In the case of Ruby, the mentoring organization
is RubyCentral Inc., the organization behind RubyConf and other
conferences. ["Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student
developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.
Google will be working with a several open source, free software and
technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over
a three month period. Accepted student applications for Google Summer
of Code have been announced. We accepted over 900 student applicants
from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications."]